What’s Wrong With Today’s Youth

I hesitate to even title my blog post this way, because it does not reflect my enjoyment of and respect for youth (by which I mean those who are seventh through twelfth graders, but I might also include college-aged people in this category as well). The title, rather, reflects the prevailing thoughts of many “adults” who observe in bewilderment the youth culture of our day.

The ironic thing to me is that many of the adults of today who ask this question are the same adults who came of age in the 1960s when their own parents were left shaking their heads at the wanton disregard for society’s prevailing norms.

The youth of today are, it seems to me, the inheritors of the cultural revolution of their parents (and grandparents). There exist today few societal norms of appropriate behavior, language or expression. The movement toward radical autonomy embraced forty years ago has abused the concept of “community” or “community values.” The reality of the matter is that one is hard pressed to identify any shared “community values,” unless, of course, that community value is that we have no community values.

I guess I can understand why that might be true in a society like our US American one which embraces individualism and praises self-initiative. That we have moved from a community-centered society to an individual-centered society is not a surprise.

But what I have a hard time understanding is why we in the community of faith (whatever the local expression of that phrase might be) have become so enculturated by individualism. Few places of worship have a distinctive draw, and those that do seem to grow and flourish because they understand their uniqueness and they leverage it for growth.

Christian Smith, a youth researcher (whose recent research has focused upon spirituality and youth) speaks of “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.” Smith contends that the majority of today’s North American youth culture (whether churched or not) subscribes to this philosophy characterized by five principles:

(1) A God exists who created and orders the world and watches over human life on earth;
(2) God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions;
(3) The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself;
(4) God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when God is needed to resolve a problem;
(5) Good people go to heaven when they die.

Based on my work with youth over the past twenty years, and based on what I experience today in working with youth of this age, I would have to affirm Smith’s contention. This is the prevailing worldview of the youth I know.

You can imagine their surprise when, for example, in confirmation classes I challenge their assumption that premartial sexual meanderings (however you wish to define that) are normal and ordinary parts of life. When I talk of a Christian view of sexuality as being intimately connected to marriage and not outside of marriage I receive either glazed looks or intrigued glances. For many of the youth I know saving sex for marriage is a novel concept. Their surprise to my counter-cultural instigations is not simply related to intimate matters such as these.

Often they find it difficult to understand a Christian concept of “sin” as separation from God and others. They have little inkling that they are anything less than (and always have been) fully moral and good at all times. What Christians have historically (well, for at least 2,000 years now) understand to be “sinful” is viewed often as simply another’s “choice,” a choice that has little immediate (and certainly no) eternal consequence.

Equally as jarring for many of the youth I work with is the idea that Jesus Christ holds any uniqueness in the world’s panoply of religious options. Their sense of pluralistic respect is laudable from a tolerance point of view (after all, I do not want the youth I interact with week after week to suddenly decide that Muslims or Buddhists or pagans, for that matter, are enemies to be conquered … this does not accord well even with Christ’s own directives to his followers), but how does one become a faithful disciple of Jesus Christ without a decision to make him a priority in one’s life?

As a Christian culture interacting with our larger world we are beyond the point of needing a simple reorientation (as may have been helpful during a “Christendom” era … more on that sometime later). Our situation is really much more like the apostolic era as recorded in the New Testament. We Christians are one group among many; we no longer have the “corner on the market” spiritually.

I find that invigorating and hopeful, frankly. That we Christians need to be dig deeper and discover anew the spiritually transforming power of Christ is that which beckons us forward.

It is the one hopeful sign I see amongst the youth I know today. If we who are rooted in our faith can find ways to offer spiritual transformation in Christ to our teenagers and young adults, we have great hope for the future. If not, we who are forty and above might as well consign ourselves to the fate of growing older and smaller together.

What’s wrong with today’s youth is that we who have been around awhile have assumed that socializing (whether it’s as simple as being nice to each other in “fellowship” or as specific enough as indoctrinating them in the ways we “do church” in our context) our youth is enough. It is not socializing our youth need; it is spiritualizing. And that is not just what youth need. It is what we all need.